A confocal laser scanning microscope using fluorescent signals is used to observe cellular-level and molecular-level phenomenon.
Unlike other tissues, the pulmonary system periodically moves due to the respiration process and the beating of the heart close to it, thus due to such motion artifacts it is difficult to obtain accurate images when wishing to obtain microscopic images.
Due to this limit, most molecular biological studies are performed in the process of extracting, fixing, and then observing tissues. However, it is difficult to find out, in living animals, changes in blood vessels, or changes or interaction of blood vessels, tissue cells in lung parenchyma, and circulating cells including erythrocytes, leukocytes, and thrombocyte.
Accordingly, it became an important subject to find out interaction between cells and molecular-level structures while physiologically maintaining respiration and circulation of living animals.
To this end, it is required to develop an imaging window that allows for observing a molecular biological mechanism that occurs in a lung system and blood vessels in vivo, and can overcome a motion-artifact of microscopic images obtained through a confocal microscope.